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<p>Screaming “slut” and “whore” at female fans of visiting teams? Apologies aren’t enough. The offenders should be kicked off their soccer team, out of their frat and suspended from the school. </p>
<p>I do not believe that this behavior is typical of the Dartmouth student body, all the more reason to come down hard on it.</p>
<p>“We suck” by Yale
Tampon march by Harvard
“Teachable moment” by Darmouth</p>
<p>I wonder which one is more intellectual (word from another hot thread)?</p>
<p>Two incidents directed at specific individuals in the space of less than one year?
If some cannot see the difference between tricking Harvard fans into holding cards reading “We suck” and calling specific Harvard athletes names such as “sluts” or casting aspersions on Harvard Jewish players (more than bagels as zeroes were involved), then the teachable moment ought to involve parents as well as students.
I trust that my former fellow grad students at Harvard who now on the Dartmouth faculty are just as appalled as I am. I’m outta here before Dartmouth parents throw virtual darts at me.</p>
<p>Dartmouth mom here. True story:</p>
<p>Me: Hi.<br>
Son’s roommate: Hey, he’s not in right now. Want me to take a message?
Me: Thanks, but I’ll just call back. We’re making sure we know we’ve got spring break figured out. What are you going to do? Head out for beaches, beer and babes?
Son’s roommate: Ahhhh. Actually I’m headed to the Ukraine to assist at an orphanage. </p>
<p>For me this was the absolute last time I tried to be hip with the college crowd! There are kids who are absolutely dedicated to living a life of service – and some of them are at Dartmouth. The precise reason WHY Dr. Kim was so courted by alumni and so quickly embraced by the students is that he has truly lived a challenging and meaningful life. Homecoming this year had students yelling his name with great enthusiasm – and at so many colleges many, many students don’t have even a clue as to the name or nature of their college president. </p>
<p>Drunken louts? Yep. Got those too. Like someone above said, it is a diverse place. AS to a minority being welcome (truly welcome – not just sorta welcome), I hope any prospective student and parent will go check the place out. Please don’t judge by some internet postings from folks who are nameless to you. Go find out! (Dr. Suess, a former Dartmouth student, would surely encourage anyone to go be curious and find out for oneself!)</p>
<p>I think it’s wrong to blame the whole student body in a brush stroke because of the behavior of some students. I think it is also wrong, dead wrong, to just say “this is just a few students who are outliers, and the rest are fine”.</p>
<p>When you put together thousands and thousands of 18-22 year old kids, no social behavior exists in a vacuum. Kids are influenced by the general temperature of the atmosphere, and consciously and unconsciously modulate their behavior based on what they think they can get away with.</p>
<p>In this case, we are not talking about 1 truly psycho kid getting out of control. We are talking about a GROUP of kids, belonging to the same/similar organizations who felt completely uninhibited and sanctioned to do whatever they did. Also, note what another poster pointed out: during the whole 90 minutes of this episode, the rest of the crowd made no attempt to give them a “dirty look” - dirty enough to send a clear signal that this is not acceptable. </p>
<p>Think of the normal distribution curve. There are always outliers. However, how far those on those on the tail end of the curve will go is very much determined by where the norm is. For instance, in a population with an average IQ of 100, three standard deviation away from the norm (very atypical outlier) may be approaching the “semi genius” range. Meanwhile, in a group with an average of IQ 60, the same three standard deviation outliers will be, what, around 100-110, which would have been basically around the norm in the other group. </p>
<p>Around the election season last year, I heard that in one of the universities in a certain region, they had a black effigy hanging from a tree (like a mob lynching) in front of a frat house. On the other hand, in another university, later, frat brothers staged a counter demonstration against viciously homo phobic demonstration by a far right church group (you know, that group that staged “God hates America because of the gays” demonstration in a fallen solider’s funeral). Would you like to guess where the “norm” consisting of average students lies in these two groups on the scale of “tolerance and respect” for individuals?</p>
<p>yes, I believe that the majority of the Dartmouth kids are just fine, and WELL within the normal, acceptable range of social attitudes and behavior. However, there is still some room for collective responsibility for having contributed to the general atmosphere where some of their friends and team mates could easily slip into that outlier zone without much inhibition or fear of being ostracized. In a way, in their silence, they became unwitting enablers. </p>
<p>It’s now up to the good students of Dartmouth to make sure that nobody feels they can get away with this kind of behavior NOT because of what some university authorities will do to punish them, but because their friends and teammates will shun them if they do.</p>
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<p>Very cute. But you’re the one who started throwing darts.</p>
<p>If you can’t distinguish between ONE student indulging in racist humor and an entire campus full of thousands of people eagerly welcoming an Asian president, then well, what can I say.</p>
<p>I’m sure one could dig around and find an example of ONE Harvard student who engaged in racist humor in the past year or so. How would you like it if the rest of us chose to extrapolate the behavior on one or even a handful of other students to apply to YOUR SON??? And to YOU???</p>
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<p>Ah, the university that shall not be named!</p>
<p>(I saw the video on YouTube. Very impressive. My son participated in one of the many other counter-demonstrations that day.)</p>
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<p>I’m not a psychologist, nor do I play one on TV. But the fact that a group [soccer team] was involved is telling. Group dynamics can be such that people will go much farther down a dark road when they are being carried away in a group than they would if they were alone.</p>
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<p>I can make that distinction, but it begins to blur when similar incidents repeatedly occur over years, or when the racist humor persists throughout a 60 or 90 minute event without any peer pressure from the crowd to stop it. The problem is not only the actions of a few but also the tolerance of the many.</p>
<p>In this thread two types of punishment are mentioned: suspension (punishment via the parents’ wallets) and singing kumbaya (after a speech). Rather black and white! Somehow it must be possible to find more creative ways. Daily cleaning up of a cafeteria during x months? Maintenance work during weekends?</p>
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<p>My judgments were from what I read in the local newspapers about incidents. This was before the general public had access to the internet. That was a long time ago but those things have a way of staying with you for a long time.</p>
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<p>Rubbish! I read the article and didn’t see any mention that the individual members of the crowd made no attempt to give the miscreants a “dirty look”–and therefore should be held complicit in the abuse. </p>
<p>I’ve been to sporting events and concerts where some members of the audience or crowd are acting inappropriately (usually alcohol fueled). We all give them the “evil eye,” but that usually doesn’t do any good–even if you give them the mother of all dirty looks, they don’t stop. If they are part of a group (or even if they are not), I don’t feel safe confronting them personally–especially if irrational behavior and/or alcohol is involved. If it gets bad enough, I go get an usher or security and let them deal with it. </p>
<p>To think that these guys were going to stop because of any dirty looks sent their way from audience members is naive. I wouldn’t have felt safe personally confronting a group of soccer guys and frat boys in this situation. What Dartmouth didn’t have and what they needed was more staffing at this event. President Kim acknowledged that they only had one person to cover 6 different matches when crowd control required 3 staff and security people.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong–lack of appropriate security and staff for crowd control is no excuse for the young men to do what they did. But to blame all those in the crowd because no one gave the boys dirty looks strong enough to deter their behavior is going too far.</p>
<p>berryberry61:</p>
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<p>First, I meant to make the note that this thread had gone on for so many **pages <a href=“instead%20of%20days”>/b</a>. My typo. But I see no where that I was making an attempt to be holier than thou - nor was I “ranting.” I was nether defending bad behavior or demanding punishment. Don’t know why you felt the need to offer no opinion on the subject at hand except to attack me personally.</p>
<p>I did not read all the postings. This type of behavior supposedly happened at a squash game. Unless time has changed, when I was in school squash was supposed to be a gentlemen game. Spectator were not allow to cheer like they do in a soccer or footfall game. The crowd is very controllable as the spectator areas are very small. Where are the coaches and the staff? Why would they allow such behavior to occur? When incidents like this happen when I played, no matter which school, the coaches and/or the players would ask the spectator to refrain from cheering like they do in a football game. They educate them about the game of squash. If that continues, they are ask to leave the area. In my opinion, the school is as responsible for such bad behavior as the students.</p>
<p>It’s important to “call” out bad behavior. It happens. My youngest got hurt during football this year. Football is not what I would in a million years call a “gentleman’s sport” but the opposing team was leading often with their helmets. Not supposed to happen. It was clear as day when it was happening and it was even clearer on the videotape. That coach and team needs to be called out on this. My other sons tennis coach had to hold a parent meeting a few years ago and “explain” to a few parents what was acceptable behavior during tennis matches because a few of the parents simply didn’t know what was acceptable in the world of tennis. He took a proactive approach. If you see unsportsmanlike behavior in players, students, parents or coaches, you call them on it. You don’t sit back and grumble and make generalizations about the entire school, the entire student body, etc. Either the students or the soccer coach (if the hecklers were indeed members of a single team) needs to ‘call out’ these kids and read them the riot act about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It doesn’t take a university president to ‘fix’ this, or the New York Times…it just takes a few students or a coach taking the hecklers to the woodshed for a few minutes.</p>
<p>This just in:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Most kids at Dartmouth are good kids – bright, honorable, hard-working, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>The behavior at the squash match went beyond standard heckling to sexist and anti-Semitic behavior. Calling girls sluts and whores and asking the Jewish kid about his business ethics are not the same as yelling airball when a basketball player misses.</p></li>
<li><p>The behavior was so far across the line that there wasn’t anyone there (heckler or non-heckling spectator) who didn’t or shouldn’t have known that it was unacceptable. I don’t buy the “we didn’t know the norms of behavior” excuse. I agree that another batch of sensitivity training is not the solution. Everyone there had to know, at a certain point, that this behavior was unacceptable.</p></li>
<li><p>Ivy bands are tasteless (usually and funny sometimes) but their behavior is different than sexist or racist slurs directed at individuals. </p></li>
<li><p>There are bigots at all of these fine institutions. If you search for racist incidents at X, you will find newspaper articles, etc. about all of these schools. </p></li>
<li><p>The real question for President Kim is whether this was just a few rotten apples or whether there is something institutional that enables this behavior to emerge. That is to say, are there individuals at other schools including Harvard who might engage in this behavior but are restrained by norms or institutions that are stronger there than at Dartmouth? I’m not a Dartmouth hater and my son almost went there so this isn’t an exercise in schadenfreude but instead an attempt to be diagnostic. </p></li>
<li><p>Again, bigots and rude people exist at all schools. I suspect that there is something in the culture/institution at Dartmouth that hasn’t stamped this kind of behavior out. My really informal survey from Google searches that many of the racist incidents at Ivies were individual but that there was a higher prevalence over the years of semi-organized incidents at Dartmouth, sometimes connected to the Dartmouth Review. For example, if I remember correctly, there was a wildly conservative fringe at Dartmouth of students and alums often gather around the Dartmouth Review that in the old days said pretty offensive and sometimes racist stuff. There were conservatives at other schools (Sam Alito, for example) who did not cross the line to offensive so blatantly. </p></li>
<li><p>If that is true, the question is why Dartmouth has had a harder time quashing semi-organized bad behavior. One observation that I heard from students last year was that fraternities and sports teams at Dartmouth seem to have a relatively more prominent role in social life and social status. Organized groups with tight cultures can foster behavior that individuals would be more cautious about undertaking on their own. This might make it easier to commit these acts and harder to censure the actors in the past and the fringe alums/Dartmouth Review have been there to defend them. By the way, I’m not castigating athletes (I was one), just commenting on the effects of organizations with tight cultures (and probably hazing rituals of one sort or another). To the extent that bad actors have not been castigated as fully there as elsewhere (a hypothesis), they are more likely to recur. If so, there is an institutional problem that cannot be addressed by sensitivity training. Pulling the charter of the fraternity for a year, if it were deemed to have been a player, or possibly censuring the soccer team in some way if its players were the key actors, would send a much stronger message. A teaching moment where the lessons come from actions rather than words.</p></li>
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<p>I think that cold/isolated schools gravitate towards fraternities as a social outlet.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t see something like this in Cambridge or Boston without a very strong reaction from the local community. I think that just the presence of minorities all around you in the cities has an effect on the students and their behavior.</p>
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<p>I don’t think you’ve been on the Dartmouth campus lately. The student body would appear at a casual glance to be roughly 50% “people of color.” There are plenty of Jews, too, you know. I also wonder if you’ve strolled around Harvard Square lately. The racial makeup there would appear to be very much the same as in Hanover.</p>
<p>I also think that you aren’t aware that according to the commentary on this issue in Boston.com the heckling at events such as Harvard hockey games is exactly like that at the infamous squash match. But of course the hecklers are masked by a larger crowd, and the Boston Globe, aka the Harvard House Organ, isn’t going to report on it because according to those who frequent such events it is expected in that milieu. It is not expected at a squash match.</p>
<p>And frankly, the idea that the minority population of the Boston area has any idea what goes on at Harvard squash matches is pretty ridiculous.</p>
<p>Note that I am NOT excusing this stuff. I find “humor” of this sort to be degrading to all concerned, no matter WHO does it.</p>
<p>I am bemused by the dredging up of instances of apparent racism on the part of Dartmouth Review-related people 20 or more years ago. On the other hand, the lingering presence–if it exists-- of that strain at D is sure to please Thomas Sowell and the other authors of “Finding the Right College,” not to mention our very own CC right wingers who claim that everyone else is too sensitive.</p>
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<p>They have panhandlers at the subway stop in Hanover? My comments were on the makeup
of the local population.</p>
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<p>Perhaps you could provide a few examples of this racist heckling.</p>
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<p>Strawman. Would the Professor Gates incident play out in Hanover as it did in
Cambridge?</p>
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<p>It’s odd that you find the effects of racism amusing.</p>
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<p>It’s easy to be insensitive when it happens to someone else.</p>
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<p>Marite: don’t go! I’m a Dartmouth parent who finds the behavior deplorable. (But I also don’t wear blinders.)</p>
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<p>Forget the Review. Read the campus daily paper. Look up in archives. Been a D parent for four years now, and each and every one of those past four years has produced “issues” requiring “teachable moments.” IMO, time to “teach” with a little tough love. Suspend the soccer players. Kick-em off the team. (Sure season is over, but can eliminate off-season practice with the team). For next year’s returners, perhaps suspend 'em for a game or two, particularly against H. Kick-em out of the frats. Add a letter to their rec file. (Sure, that won’t happen, but the point is with a little creativity, a “teachable moment” will become memorable.)</p>